There is a common assumption that different teas come from different plants, in the way that apples and pears come from different trees.
They do not. The overwhelming majority of…
There is a failure mode in any signalling system that is worth more attention than the system itself, and lighthouses have an obvious one.
A light works by being seen.…
There is a category of invention that is hard to recognise as an invention because it seems like a description of how things obviously are.
Alphabetical order is the clearest…
There is a structure that appears on rivers everywhere, that most people cannot name correctly, and that does something quite different from what it appears to do.
A weir looks…
There is a useful question to ask about any traditional material: what problem does the processing solve, and what happens if you skip it?
For leather the answer is unusually…
There is a common way of describing chimneys that gets the direction of the mechanism backwards and consequently makes every practical problem inexplicable.
The description is that smoke rises and…